Pipelines are commonly used in the transportation of oil and gas. There are more than 300,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines in North America. Construction costs are now of the order of $1,000,000 per mile. The typical initial operating life of the pipelines are expected to be about 40 years, but 50% of the of the existing pipelines will be 40 years old at the year 2000.
Accurate monitoring of the pipelines is critical due to the potential risks to the environment when the pipelines rupture and due to the high costs of repair or replacement. Since oil and gas pipelines are normally buried, in-service inspection is performed by pumping a “smart electronic inspection pig” through the pipeline from one compressor station to the next.
Generally, the inspection tool detects and collects data indicating abnormalities (e.g., leakage, corrosion or metal loss) in the internal and external pipe surface or wall. The inspection tool may provide detailed signals about the condition of the pipelines. The signals are then converted to accurate estimates of defect size and geometry. This requires considerable expertise, as well as a detailed understanding of the effects of inspection conditions and the behavior of the type of pipeline steel used.
The information collected by the smart electronic inspection pig can be analyzed by an evaluation or analyzer software. The information can also be stored on a storage device such as, for example, a compact disc (CD) and can then be readily available for further analysis. The analyzer software typically reads large volumes of data generated during the inspection. The analyzer software may include a graphical user interface. Using the data collected during the inspection, the analyzer software may generally perform some data analysis and generates written and electronic reports or some form of graphical display.
Pipeline inspection activities or survey are generally performed by consulting firms such as pipeline assessment services performing both the data collection activity and the data analysis activity. An intelligent pigging survey is expensive and may cost some hundreds of thousand of dollars, with certain long distance, more complicated lines being charged well in excess of this.
It would be cost advantageous if the user of the pipeline inspection data, (e.g., an oil company) could be enabled to have control of both the pipeline inspection data and the analyzer program that analyze the pipeline inspection data. This way the inspection data can be analyzed as often as desired and at any time as desired. However, the cost of an analyzer program may be prohibitively expensive and economically unattractive.